Introduction
The following analysis presents an argument about Christianity and its position concerning the various faith bases available in the USA.
Faith bases that exist in the United States include, but not limited to Islamic, Hindu, Christianity, and Buddhism. It is important to understand the concept of religious pluralism in order to give a detailed account on Christianity and its views concerning other religious bases in America.
Overview
The concept of religious pluralism concerns interfaith dialogue that takes place between members of different faith bases. This is done to reduce religious conflicts and to arrive at a common and mutual objective. In fact, this mutual objective cannot be met easily when different religious members fail to adopt universalism.
By adopting particularism stand, different faith bases fail to agree on a common goal since every group only cares for its own. In fact, this is what fuels religious conflicts in the United States, especially the conflict between Christians and Muslims.
It is difficult to achieve the goals of the interfaith dialogue because each group holds a completely different view. For instance, Christians maintain a firm position that salvation can only received in their religion.
Christian Views
Christianity disregards the teaching of other faith bases in the United States, and this makes it hard to reconcile different religions so as to avoid conflicts. Some Christians have disregarded the concept of religious pluralism, arguing that the interfaith dialogue concept contradicts their religious doctrines.
These Christian groups do not hold to the teaching that all forms of religious bases are true. They strongly believe that this idea is not only illogical, but also contradicting. However, some Christians hold to the idea that it is possible to get truth values among other faith bases in the United States.
Even though, there is a possibility that God might have reached the other faith bases through other means, Christians should respect to other religious members. In fact, the belief of Christians that their religion is more perfect than others and it is the only way where truth originates has been highly criticized by the Islamic Quran.
This is widely supported by the Islamic view that someone can only embrace salvation as a guide, when he/she accepts to join Christianity. Muslims hold to the strong belief that they can cooperate with their Christian neighbors, but not on matters of theological debates.
Moreover, Christians have never supported the spread of Christianity through conquest. Muslim rule of conquest is an indirect way of converting people to Islam.
Though, Muslims believe that war is used as a method of putting land to be under the Islamic territorial rule, but the subjects are free to join a religion of their choice. This is an indirect way of religious coercion to convert to another faith. The conquest and coercion are some of the Islamic practices, which are highly criticized by Christianity.
In sum, Christianity and its position on different faith bases in the USA emphasize that absolute truth can only be found in the religion.
Though, Muslims strongly criticize the concept of salvation and do not want to engage in theological debates, Christians still maintain that salvation is the right path. Indeed, Christianity does not support the idea of conquest to advance its faith as Muslims do.
Christianity teaches that peaceful co-existence with other people is the only way to attain salvation since war leads to destruction of property and loss of life. Christianity does not support killing other human beings.